iousness of painful
separation from the soul nearest to his own, and by a constantly
increasing sense of oppression, of closing avenues and narrowing
alternatives, which for weeks together seemed to hold the mind in a grip
whence there was no escape.

That struggle was not hurried and embittered by the bodily presence of
the squire. Mr. Wendover went off to Italy a few days after the
conversation we have described. But though he was not present in the
flesh the great book of his life was in Elsmere's hands, he had formally
invited Elsmere's remarks upon it; and the air of Murewell seemed still
echoing with his sentences, still astir with his thoughts. That curious
instinct of pursuit, that avid imperious wish to crush an irritating
resistance, which his last walk with Elsmere had first awakened in him
with any strength, persisted. He wrote to Robert from abroad, and the
proud fastidious scholar had never taken more pains with anything than
with those letters.

Robert might have stopped them, might have cast the whole matter from
him with one resolute effort. In other relations he had will enough and
to spare.

Was it an unexpected weakness of fibre that made it impossible?--that
had placed him in this way at the squire's disposal? Half the world
would answer yes. Might not the other half plead that in every
generation there is a minority of these mobile, impressionable,
defenceless natures, who are ultimately at the mercy of experience, at
the mercy of thought, at the mercy (shall we say?) of truth; and that,
in fact, it is from this minority that all human advance comes?

During these three miserable months it cannot be said--poor
Elsmere!--that he attempted any systematic study of Christian evidence.
His mind was too much torn, his heart too sore. He pounced feverishly on
one test point after another, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the
relation of the New Testament to the thoughts and beliefs of its time,
the Gospel of St. John, the evidence as to the Resurrection, the
intellectual and moral conditions surrounding the formation of the
Canon. His mind swayed hither and thither, driven from each
resting-place in turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And--let
it be said again--all through, the only constant element in the whole
dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone through
this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have come out of it
unscathed: for he would simply have remain